Start a Bucket List and Live Your Crazy Dreams

Last week’s blog highlighted the critical role perspective plays in establishing and reaching our goals, paths, and dreams. This week, we’re going to outline how to build the coolest long-term list you can ever build: a Bucket List.

In the 2007 movie with Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson, two unlikely characters are thrown together as a result of ghoulish consequences. They’ve both been recently diagnosed with cancer and have a limited time to live. As a result, they end up making a “Bucket List” of things they want to do in their remaining days. I want to encourage everyone who read this to embrace the idea that we all have expiration dates; we only have one life to live and it us up to us on how we do that.

Okay, I’ll step down from my bully pulpit now.

When I was 19 years old, I lost my best friend, also 19, to cancer. It was all the pain you may think it was, but a great lesson came out of that experience. Initially dealing with this challenge, I felt I owed it to my dead friend (I know, a bit creepy) to have as much fun and adventure as could for the both of us. I felt I was obligated to chase twice as many girls, drink twice as much liquor, and to push the envelope as far as I could. I was young and dumb enough to not know that I couldn’t continue doing these things; as a result, my adventures kept ratcheting up. This included living on the beach in California and the mountains in Vail to traveling to corners of the world and starting multiple successful businesses. It even led to me eventually finding my bride, another wayward traveler, on a freighter in Patagonia, Chile.

I’d been gifted with two major events that impacted my way of thinking. Unwittingly, I’d been given the right incentive and tools to go out and do what I didn’t know I should be able to. I wasn’t independently wealthy; in fact, during most of those years, virtually all of my friends made more than me. My adventures were great, but they were very budget-based. I kept my life simple, always negotiated three to six weeks off a year (which was a lot of time in the 90s), and built goals around what I wanted to do. I dreamed crazy dreams…and then I went and did them. Not because I could, but more because I didn’t know I couldn’t.

I firmly believe the number one contributor to our own success – on any level – is our own thinking. We’re so unfathomably lucky to be living in such a time of abundance. Anything we want is there for us; we just have to know we want it. Build, plan, then go get it!

The last section of the Our Best Life outline is the Bucket List. The process is laid out in this manner because as you dig in, learn, and begin to achieve your dreams, your Bucket List items will begin surfacing, eventually becoming achievable goals.

Bucket List items have virtually no rules attached. They can be adventures, experiences, stuff, contributions, or anything you can imagine. Dream big – what do you want to do before you die? Your answers can be big or small. The intention here is to create a place to store these dreams to ensure you don’t lose them.

My challenge to you is to make sure you’re dreaming big. Get crazy! You don’t have to know how you’re going to get there. Just dream…

Here are some examples of ours:

Live in Nepal and hike the Annapurna circuit

Introduce 1,000,000 people to a new way of thinking (goals and dreaming big)

Revisit Antarctica and the island of South Georgia

Climb Aconcagua (22,841 feet)

Go on a cattle drive (Reka’s addition – I don’t get it, but I’ll go)

Change a 100,000 people’s lives

Create a foundation with a lasting impact

In the future, you’ll choose one of the items from your Bucket List, dive in, and construct a plan to achieve it – step by step, experience by experience. The first step is identifying where you want to go.